Translation Rights TQE / Ideas for the Impure Imagination

Ideas para la imaginación impura (Ideas for the Impure Imagination) is an inexhaustible and lucid repertoire of clues to the unusual sources of inspiration of the scientist. According to Jorge Wagensberg, any stimulus whatsoever is capable of feeding creative scientific imagination - a personal experience, an intuition, a belief or even an ideological prejudice. Everything is possible, he says, since scientific imagination is intellectually omnivorous. But not everything in science is imagination; there is also method, and it is precisely in method where we find the main difference with other forms of knowledge, such as art or revelation. In fact, the progress of science is nurtured by this recurrent discrepancy from the teachings of the masters, no matter how significant these may be. Scientific creativity, therefore, lies somewhere between discipline and chaos, will and irresolution, rigor and impulse, analogy and paradox, continuity and revolution.

It is in this no-man’s land where we find many of the experiences from which such an original and brilliant thinker as Wagensberg extracts general principles concerning truth and falsehood, good and bad, the simple and the complex, time and emotion. As the author himself says, these are reflections “in their own substance”, illustrated with genuine confessions concerning the time, place, and circumstances under which they emerge and lead to ideas. This book is a very entertaining diary of the daily routine of a unique scientist.

Jorge Wagensberg (Barcelona, 1948), Doctor of Physics, is professor of Irreversible Process Theory at the University of Barcelona. He not only investigates and disseminates science, but is also a dynamic promoter of the debate of ideas, which has achieved him Catalonia’s National Prize for Scientific Thought and Culture, among other awards. He is the director of our Metatemas collection and is now responsible for the Scientific and Environmental Area of the “la Caixa” Foundation, after having directed the scientific museum CosmoCaixa, a reference for science museums around the world. He is the author of a dozen books and of many works of investigation on thermodynamics, mathematics, biophysics, microbiology, paleontology, entomology, scientific museology, and the philosophy of science, as well as of journalistic articles on a number of different topics. We have published six wokrs, among them Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿cuál era la pregunta?, La rebelión de las formas, A más cómo menos por qué and El gozo intelectual.